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Your French Pootle Needs Your Help

17 Dec 2007

Limbu script on OLPC XO

And your Spanish, Hindi, Romanian, Russian, and Urdu Pootles do too. OLPC is using Pootle to help adapt the XO laptop for use in non-English-speaking countries.

Are you anxiously awaiting your laptop and still wishing you could do more? Why not spend a few minutes a day browsing a list of words in English and suggesting translations into another language, like Nepali?

How it works is that you go to the localization server for the One Laptop per Child Project. Register by creating a username and password and providing your name and email address. Choose the languages you wish to contribute to, and then the specific file of the project, like "XO Core" or "Terminology."

Pick a word from the list on the left and write a suggestion in the box on the right. Clicking "Suggest" sends the translation to the server. If your Amharic is rusty, and you're not quite sure about your suggestion, check the box beside the word "Fuzzy" to let the program know that too.

OLPC put out a call for volunteers to assist with the work at Pootle. You don't have to be a registered translator or certified expert. Right now every language needs work, some more than others. The Korean "Terminology" file is 100 percent untranslated. The Arabic "Packaging" file is about half done.

And for those thinking only technical words are needed--well, they're not. In the "XO Bundled" file, they need translations suggested for words like "Run," "Stop," and "Play." So here is another way you can help make sure there is one laptop usable per child everywhere in the world.

This story was submitted by Eden Krehbiel, a fan of the OLPC project and the Give 1, Get 1 program. You too can write for OLPC News today!

CleoQc, I went to the Pootle site and was able to login using my current account. But when I tried to register a new account, it gave me the error too. I am attempting to contact someone about this now.

17. Localization: Arjun, Manu, Bernie, and Walter worked through integration of patches for Afghan (including Dari, Pashto and Uzbek variants), Mongolian, Ethiopian, Nepali, and Italian keyboard layouts. All of them (except Italian and Nepali) are expected to be integrated into Update. Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Italian, Marathi and Sinhala. Continuing on his recent efforts with QA and testing with respect to local-language support, Sayamindu has added notes in the wiki on how to utilize the translation testing features in our web-based translation management system, Pootle http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Localization/Testing#Testing_the_PO_files